Enclosure
The enclosure is designed to fulfill two critical functions:
- Optical Isolation: It provides complete light tightness, preventing ambient light from interfering with sensitive optical measurements within the microscope. This ensures accurate and reliable data acquisition by eliminating unwanted background illumination.
- Physical Protection: It safeguards the microscope's delicate components from mechanical damage, dust accumulation, and environmental contaminants. This protection extends the lifespan of the instrument and maintains optimal performance.
- Stable Imaging Environment: It isolates the environment inside the enclosure, reducing the effects of air movement, temperature and humidity fluctuations.
We'd like to note that the NL-2p1 microscope enclosure provides sufficient optical isolation to enable imaging under typical room illumination, such as ceiling lights, minimizing the need for complete darkness.
While ensuring robust optical isolation and physical protection, it is equally essential to prioritize accessibility for maintenance, component installation, and experimental adaptability. To facilitate this, the NL-2p1 microscope enclosure incorporates multiple customizable port walls. These 'static' interfaces are designed to provide convenient and adaptable access points for cables, tubing, and other experimental necessities, allowing for seamless integration of new components and streamlined experimental workflows.
 |
|---|
| 3D model of the enclosure of NL-2p1 microscope |
 |
| See through model of the enclosure |
The following photographs illustrate the NL-2p1 microscope enclosure at various stages of closure. Notice that some details here differ from the above model. In particular, the implemented enclosure also have the appendix covering optics which is close to the laser (on the right). The wall on the left is also collapsible, and the port walls have light tight openings for the projector, water cooling system, syringe injection tubing, cable management port and a port insert for the stepper motor stage interface.
 |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
 |
The walls of the enclosure are made of Black Hardboard from Thorlabs, which is at the same time quite strong, but is also easy to work with. For different enclosures, we purchased the frame components from either Thorlabs or McMaster. They are very similar, however the slots are slightly different in size and are not always interchangeable. For the list of materials used to build the enclosure for NL-2p1 microscope from the figures above see NL-2p1_asmbly.xlsx.
It is convenient to have LED lighting with remote control inside the enclosure. In NL-2p1, we utilize a commercial LED strip from amazon.